Ruling — Pavlov's House

← Pavlov's House

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Pavlov's Housebg-219101-en-1e

Depending on the chosen difficulty level, the setup is as follows:

Normal Difficulty

1. Add the Wehrmacht Riflemen card marked 'Competitive' to the '1' deck.[1]

2. Set up the Wehrmacht and Resupply cards as normal.[1]

3. Sort the Tactics Cards by the number on the lower right of the front of the card.[1]

4. Shuffle each deck of Tactics Cards separately and place each of the decks face down.[1]

5. Take the top card from the 1 deck and remove it from the game.[1]

6. Take the top two cards from the 2, 3, and 4 decks and remove them from the game.[1]

7. Stack the decks face down on top of one another in order, with the 4 deck at the bottom and the 1 deck on top.[1]

Veteran Difficulty

1. Sort the Tactics Cards by the number on the lower right of the front of the card.[2]

2. Shuffle each deck of cards separately and place each of the decks face down.[2]

3. Take the top three cards from the 1 deck and remove them from the game.[2]

4. Take the top two cards from the 2, 3, and 4 decks and remove them from the game.[2]

5. Stack the decks face down on top of one another in order, with the 4 deck at the bottom and the 1 deck on top.[2]

Elite Difficulty

1. Sort the Tactics Cards by the number on the lower right of the front of the card.[3]

2. Shuffle each deck of cards separately and place each of the decks face down.[3]

3. Take the top two cards from each of the decks and remove them from the game.[3]

4. Stack the decks face down on top of one another in order, with the 4 deck at the bottom and the 1 deck on top.[3]

Operational Support Variant

1. Shuffle the eight Operational Support cards and place them face down near the board.[4]

2. Take the top card from the deck and place it face up on the Operational Support space on the board.[4]

[1] RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook · p.32 · Setup:

[2] RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook · p.30 · 7.2 Tactics Cards [Increased Difficulty] · Setup: · Gameplay Example:

[3] RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook · p.31 · Variants · Setup: · Gameplay Example:

[4] RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook · p.29 · 7.1 Operational Support Cards · Gameplay Example:

Question closed. Friendships intact.

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile: live,vps
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only): gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings: search 174 ms · ask 3399 ms · total 3577 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 3577 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 32, "score": 0.048172, "snippet": "Add the Wehrmacht Riflemen card marked 'Competitive' to the '1' deck, then set up the Wehrmacht and Resupply cards as normal. Sort the Tactics Cards by the number on the lower right of the front of the card. Shuffle each deck of Tactics Cards separately and place each of the decks face down. Take th", "headingPath": "Setup:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1223}, {"page": 31, "score": 0.04741, "snippet": "7.2.2 Elite: At the Elite difficulty level, two Tactics Cards will be in play during the Wehrmacht Card Phase. Sort the Tactics Cards by the number on the lower right of the front of the card. Shuffle each deck of cards separately and place each of the decks face down. Take the top two cards from ea", "headingPath": "Variants · Setup: · Gameplay Example:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1223}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.045476, "snippet": "Storm Group cards represent an opportunity for the defenders of Pavlov's House to initiate a Storm Group Assault against a nearby German strongpoint. When you reveal a Storm Group Card, place it in the Storm Group box in Pavlov's House. If there was already a Storm Group Card in the box, remove that", "headingPath": "Playing the Game: Wehrmacht Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 1223}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "After resolving a Resupply Card, the card is flipped over and the Voyentorg Storm Group side of the card is revealed. Place it on the Storm Group box. During the next Soviet Card Phase, you draw a card with the 62nd Army Command Post and decide to use it to start a Storm Group Raid. You can only ini", "headingPath": "Gameplay Example:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1223}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "62nd Army Command Post: You can use this action to do one of the following: Recover: Remove a Disrupted Token from the 62nd Army Command Post location ( position 18, on the game board). Resupply: Place any combination of up to 5 Ammunition, First Aid, Food, and Sapper Tokens from the stock onto the ", "headingPath": "Playing the Game: Soviet Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 1223}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Place Wehrmacht Counter A Machine Gunners card is revealed. You roll a die and the result is a 4. A Machine Gunners counter should be placed on the first Wehrmacht counter location on the '4' track. You have the option of whether to attempt to Suppress the Machine Gunners. If you try to Suppress the", "headingPath": "Playing the Game: Wehrmacht Cards · Gameplay Example:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1223}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "267th Separate Anti-aircraft Battalion: You can use this action to do one of the following: Recover: Remove a Disrupted Token from one of the 267th Separate Antiaircraft Battalion locations (12, 13, on the game board). Ready Anti-aircraft: Place one Anti-aircraft Token from the stock onto one of the", "headingPath": "Playing the Game: Soviet Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 1223}, {"page": 29, "score": 0.030018, "snippet": "Once you are familiar with the core rules of Pavlov's House, you can add the Operational Support cards to the Soviet Card Phase. The Operational Support cards represent other key Stalingrad battlegrounds. By allocating limited resources to these battlegrounds, the 62nd Army leaves the defenders of P", "headingPath": "7.1 Operational Support Cards · Gameplay Example:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1223}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 32, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1223}, {"page": 30, "quote": null, "headingPath": "7.2 Tactics Cards [Increased Difficulty] · Setup: · Gameplay Example:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1223}, {"page": 31, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Variants · Setup: · Gameplay Example:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1223}, {"page": 29, "quote": null, "headingPath": "7.1 Operational Support Cards · Gameplay Example:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1223}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1223 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1223 boosted
answered-before recall: this ruling was answered, so past rulings were not offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
answer fence: passed — letter density 0.89363 of 1429 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Oct 24, 2026 20:59 UTC

retrieval — what the passage search returned

what this block IS: the PASSAGE SEARCH's own results — the same search that fills this page's closest-passages list — and NOT the passages the answerer read. Answering runs its OWN retrieval: a far wider candidate pool, re-ranked down to a final handful, plus floors this search never applies — the base rulebook, surviving errata corrections, and one slot per book on a multi-book read. Each of those armed only if THIS ask sent what it needs: the boost block names the ids it forwarded, and the scope line names the books it read. A document the answer CITES that no row here names is therefore EXPECTED, not a defect: two searches, two candidate pools, two orders. The answerer's own final rows are shown in their own block below, beside these and never mixed into them.

score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. This ruling ran the THREE-ARM fuse (full-text + vector + the doc-priority boost arm, which carried the base rulebook and/or the errata corrections this query matched), whose arithmetic ceiling is 0.04918 — all three arms ranking the same chunk #1 (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60). The measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 was measured on TWO-arm asks and does not bound this one: its high end is the two-arm ceiling, and a third arm has room above it. A chunk only one arm ranked highly lands near 0.016 (that one arm's #1 vote), so 0.03 here is an excellent hit, not a 3% match.

per-arm ranks (the rank each search arm gave a chunk): NOT DISCLOSED by the gateway. Fusion happens gateway-side and only the FUSED score crosses the wire, so rulesage cannot show them without a gateway change. The rank column below is the FUSED rank (position in the returned list), which is real.

token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.

fused rank	document	heading	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	Setup:	p.32	0.048172 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#2	RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	Variants · Setup: · Gameplay Example:	p.31	0.04741 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#3	RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	Playing the Game: Wehrmacht Cards	p.20	0.045476 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#4	RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	Gameplay Example:	p.20	0.031746 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#5	RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	Playing the Game: Soviet Cards	p.8	0.03125 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#6	RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	Playing the Game: Wehrmacht Cards · Gameplay Example:	p.16	0.030769 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#7	RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	Playing the Game: Soviet Cards	p.10	0.030303 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#8	RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	7.1 Operational Support Cards · Gameplay Example:	p.29	0.030018 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300

what the answerer read — the passages it actually had in front of it

what this block IS: the passages the ANSWERING read put in front of the answerer, in the order it read them — the other half of the two reads described above, and the one that decides what the answer could possibly say. Each row names the book it came from and where in that book it sits, what it scored when the search arms were fused, which arm carried it there, and whether the re-ranker chose it or a floor guaranteed it a slot. A row here that no passage-search row names is EXPECTED: a far wider pool, re-ranked, with floors the passage search never applies.

candidate pool: the answering read scored 39 passages, out of a ceiling of 80 set gateway-side. Both figures are reported by the gateway for THIS ask — measurements of what actually happened, not constants read out of anyone's source and printed here on faith.

floors armed for this ask: the base rulebook — armed · surviving errata corrections — not armed · one slot per book on a multi-book read — not armed. Every floor is stated on every ask, armed or not, so a floor that did not apply here is never mistaken for one this app does not know about.

arms fused for this ask: vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm. Stated separately from the rows because an arm that ran and carried nothing is a different fact from an arm that never ran.

read at	document	heading	page	fused rank	fused RRF score	carried by	how it got its slot
#1	RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	Setup:	p.32	#1	0.048172 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	7.2 Tactics Cards [Increased Difficulty] · Setup: · Gameplay Example:	p.30	#11	0.028694 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	PAGE 1 · PAGE 2 · PAGE 3 · PAGE 4 · PAGE 5 · PAGE 9 · …	p.2	#9	0.029551 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	Playing the Game: Soviet Cards	p.8	#5	0.03125 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	Gameplay Example:	p.20	#4	0.031746 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	Playing the Game: Wehrmacht Cards	p.20	#3	0.045476 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	7.1 Operational Support Cards · Gameplay Example:	p.29	#8	0.030018 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	Variants · Setup: · Gameplay Example:	p.31	#2	0.04741 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	Setup:	p.32	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	7.2 Tactics Cards [Increased Difficulty] · Setup: · Gameplay Example:	p.30	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	Variants · Setup: · Gameplay Example:	p.31	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	7.1 Operational Support Cards · Gameplay Example:	p.29	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 174 ms · first delta 1139 ms · total 3577 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 0 ms · retrieval 174 ms · ask 3399 ms · gateway work 3577 ms · total 3577 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3690
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 476
tok/sec: 200.7 tok/sec — 476 output tokens in 2.372 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 41s ago)
gateway schema (read from the running child): schema head 0042_definer_search_path (live revision not readable by this principal)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 5h, checked 4s ago)
answerer node (the seat proxy's own header — this probe, not this ask): node1
stream path: streamed — the gateway pushed at least one accumulated draft
watchdog: first-token watchdog: 30s per arming window (rulesage.table.first-token-watchdog-seconds), re-armed once by the passages frame — so the worst case before a reader falls back to polling is 60s. Whether it actually fired is a BROWSER-side decision that never reaches the server, so it is not recorded here. The stream path above is the server's half of that story: whether a delta was emitted at all.
num_ctx · think posture: both are the CHILD's settings, not rulesage's, and no ask reply carries them — an answer never states which context window or think posture produced it. The live-seat line above reads them from the running child instead, where the gateway can answer for itself; it describes the child NOW, not this ask.

disposition

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered): answered — no abstain rationale applies

setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render

decision: NO_APPROVED_CHECKLIST — setup-shaped, but no approved setup checklist exists for this game
pattern that matched: SETUP — "setup" / "set up"
matched words (in the normalized question): setup

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 1153), so "no registered errata card matched" above could never have matched one

Errata scope: the gate above matched this ruling's own edition only. When an ask also reads an expansion, that expansion's own registered errata cards stay outside the match — a stated phase-1 limitation, not a failed lookup.